A fantasy sports game is a game where users act as managers or owners of simulated sport teams called “fantasy teams,” where each team comprises a number of “players,” often known as a “roster.” Thus, the term “owner” is used to refer to a participant in the fantasy sports game. An owner may be a natural person or a computer-controlled opponent. A “user” is a fantasy owner who is also a natural person. Thus, the term “user” and “owner” are used interchangeably. In contrast, the term “player” refers to one of the selectable fantasy characters. In certain fantasy sports games, each player corresponds to an athlete in a professional sport league.
In these fantasy sports games, users are organized into groups, called “leagues,” for the purposes of competition. It is customary for each league to have rules that relate to the fantasy sports game; for example, they may set limits upon the number of players allowed on any team, and they may determine the system by which a score is computed and victory is determined.
In conventional fantasy sports games, users may divide their roster into two sets, “active” players and “benched” players (collectively, “the bench”). It is customary for the rules of the league to specify the number of players who may be active at one time. Furthermore, benched players are customarily excluded from the calculation when computing the score of a match-up.
In some conventional games, the collective statistical values of the bench may be used to break a tie.
It is further customary for the league rules to define a plurality of “active roster slots,” or “slots,” wherein each slot may be limited as to which fantasy players may occupy the slot; often, these limits are based upon the position they play in the actual sport. For example, in a fantasy sports game based upon American football, a “quarterback slot” may be filled only by a player whose position is quarterback.
In this way, the “active roster” can be defined as the group of players on a fantasy team, each of whom occupies an active roster slot, accordingly to the rules of the fantasy team. A “lineup” consists of a proposed active roster and the remaining benched players, such that a lineup can be seen as a specific manner to arrange the players on the team and to determine who is to be active.
As is common in the art, the terms “lineup,” “roster,” and “team” may be used interchangeably in this document, with the precise meaning evident from content, or specified for clarity, as necessary.
Conventional recommendation engines are known in the art. One conventional engine recommends which players should constitute the active roster; these may be known as “start/sit recommendations.” They tend to be based upon a specific expectation of the points to be scored and are made without reference to the other team in the matchup. That is, they focus on attempting to score the most possible points without any concern about what the other team will do or how likely victory may be.
Furthermore, conventional recommendation methods often focus on the team of the owner as a whole and generate the recommendation as a function of a highest potential score given the roster of the owner. Accordingly, the conventional recommendation methods generate the recommendation independent of the opponent. However, by focusing only on the roster of the owner, there is a likelihood that the recommended team may lose due to factors such as variance in expected statistics of the players who are placed on the team.